Java EE 8 update: No more JSR 373 and JSR 368

Oracle is officially withdrawing Management 2.0 (JSR 373) and JMS 2.1 (JSR 368). These changes reflect the importance ranking of these technologies in the Java EE 8 community survey.

Oracle has decided not to pursue JSR 373 and JSR 368 at this time. They are also “investigating a possible transfer of MVC to another community member or organization in order to complete JSR 371 as a stand-alone component,” according to the official announcement.

The withdrawal appears to be consistent with the Java EE roadmap presented at JavaOne 2016 by Anil Gaur, Group Vice President of Cloud Application Foundation at Oracle in which the company proposed to remove these JSRs from Java EE 8.

Java EE Roadmap (JavaOne 2016)

Plus, the decision to withdraw JSR 373 and JSR 368 “reflects the importance ranking of these technologies in Oracle’s follow-up Java EE community survey. Management, JMS, and MVC were ranked at or near the bottom of all technologies which were surveyed.” Check out the revised Java EE 8 proposal here and the Java EE 8 specification draft here.

Gaur announced at JavaOne 2016 that Java EE 8 will be ready by the end of next year and Java EE 9 will be released one year from then. “The work for Java EE 9 will start right now,” he concluded.

What’s up with Java EE Management?

Last month Roland Huß, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, wrote in a blog post that Java EE Management is dead but that’s ok because “JSR 373 never really took off.” He emphasized that it became obvious in early 2016 that JSR 373 was “not on Oracle’s focus anymore“.

Huß opined that even though the Java EE 8 community survey showed that over 60 percent were in favor of defining a new API for managing application, which should be based on REST (thus leading to JSR 373), “a deep interest in this topic was not really given and probably lead to this final decision to drop JSR 373 from Java EE 8.”